after a few trials and errors, i realized that whenever i plug anything in via usb, whether my printer, a flash drive, or something else, i immediately get a blue screen.

the weird part is this - on the bsod, there's really no message like there is on most blue screens.

it says

a problem has been detected and windows has shut down to prevent damage to your computer... then goes right on to say 'if this is the first time you've seen this...' without any kind of error code between phrases.

the stop error at the bottom says

"STOP: 0x0000007E (OxC0000005, 0xF70D395A, 0xF7CD37FA, OxF7CD34F0)"

this is about a 3 year old pentium 4 desktop running xp, 3.00ghz, 1gb ram.

0x0000007E: SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED
A system thread generated an exception which the error handler did not catch. There are numerous individual causes for this problem, including hardware incompatibility, a faulty device driver or system service, or some software issues.